32-Year-Old Woman Wakes Up Thinking She Is 15 & It’s The Year 1992

An English woman named Naomi Jacobs was a 32-year-old woman and mother of an 11 year-old boy attending Manchester Metropolitan University when she went to sleep one night in 2008. Inexplicably she woke up the next morning with no memory of the last 17 years of her life. In her mind she was 15 year’s old again and thought that the year was 1992. You can listen to the fascinating interview she did with the BBC below. It’s enough to make you want to grab your pager and your Kris Kross cassette tape.

Her last memory was getting in her bunk bed at the age of 15. Having seemingly jumped a decade and a half into the future, strangely all of the electronics in her house such as smart phones and her modern television seemed like something straight out of a science fiction movie. Great Scott!

While her bizarre experience of “time travel” is fascinating, sadly she didn’t recognize her house or even her own son. When the boy ran up to her asking for his mom, she felt a mix of emotions:

“Everything from fear to joy from seeing this child that I didn’t have any memory of giving birth to, but knew undoubtedly that he was mine because he looked so much like me, to terror of having the responsibility of this small child.”

Naomi Jacobs today.

She was hoping she could just fall asleep and wake back up in 1992. She thought that her adult voice was too deep and sounded odd, but when she looked in the mirror she knew it wasn’t a dream.

Naomi Jacobs at the actual age of 15.

Doctors determined that she suffered from Transient Global Amnesia brought about by stress while studying for a degree, and running a business. While she lost her “episodic memory” she still had “semantic memory” and could remember things like telephone numbers and her ATM account number. She even remembered how to drive a car, something she couldn’t do at 15, but was too freaked out to get behind the wheel. I guess a Prius would be pretty weird for someone from 1992.

After eight weeks her memory returned. She says she was happy to be able to see her adult life from the perspective of her younger self.

What do you think a younger version of yourself would think of your current life?